Stefan Molyneux rebuts the deliciously sophistic Libertarians Are the New Communists article by Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, which was recently published by Bloomberg. Stefan reads the article and hilarity ensues.
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| Hi, everybody. | |
| Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Ooh, it's time for our tasty breakfast of sophistry in the morning. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| A bunch of people sent me this article entitled, Libertarians are the New Communists. | |
| I guess that means the preteen communists, the guys who can't get that Jeremiah Old Testament Methuselah-style beard yet. | |
| But let's have a look. | |
| It's a juicy, tasty, wonderful morsel of sophistry and misdirection. | |
| So I think even if you don't care about the topic, it's good to learn how to break down this kind of language. | |
| It starts, most people would consider radical libertarianism and communism polar opposites. | |
| Just listen to the sophistry coming in here. | |
| So you know you're dealing with a sophist, and the sophists are the ancient enemy of Socrates, the people who make the worst argument appear the better. | |
| Most people who are sophists will start off with mental imagery, And allegories and positioning statements, this is Neurolinguistic Programming 101, they start with imagery rather than definitions. | |
| So, I haven't read this article yet. | |
| I haven't just read the first paragraph, so I'm going to see if this theory holds true. | |
| So, the first thing he puts in is the word radical libertarianism. | |
| So radical, of course, has views of extremism, of hyper-ideology, of intransigence, of defensiveness, of personal gratification from insane absolutism and so on. | |
| So radical libertarianism and communism, polar opposites. | |
| Polar, of course, is a great way of saying two extremes. | |
| And polar means unpleasant, right? | |
| And extremely cold temperatures, opposite ends of the world. | |
| Nothing moderate and arid and bare. | |
| So this is the way that you're being programmed to emotionally be led by the argument. | |
| And let's see if he has any definition. | |
| He says the first, i.e., radical libertarianism, glorifies personal freedom. | |
| Now, glorifies is a way of projecting an emotional argument onto your opponent. | |
| So, it worships, it is addicted to personal freedom, it glorifies personal freedom. | |
| This is an irrational preference. | |
| This is an irrational absolutist preference that is emotionally driven. | |
| We don't glorify the fact that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. | |
| We don't glorify the fact that gases expand when heated. | |
| We don't glorify the inverse square law or E equals MC squared. | |
| The moment that you say someone glorifies something, you're saying that they have an irrational, idealistic, ideological attachment to it that's not based in any rationality. | |
| We don't glorify that two and two make four, the Earth is a sphere. | |
| Now, personal freedom. | |
| The first glorifies personal freedom. | |
| Personal freedom is a really great way of identifying libertarianism. | |
| Personal freedom is always associated with selfishness, right? | |
| In other words, well, I want what I want, and to hell with everyone else. | |
| Let's see if he sets up this duality. | |
| So he says the first glorifies personal freedom. | |
| As opposed to what kind of freedom? | |
| Freedom for plants? | |
| Freedom for collectives? | |
| Freedom for concepts? | |
| Freedom for Miley Cyrus' ass to shake itself? | |
| What is personal freedom compared to what kind of freedom? | |
| It would be like saying the first glorifies human freedom, as opposed to the freedom of creeping vines to go up your leg like a pedophile. | |
| So he said the first glorifies personal freedom. | |
| The second, i.e. | |
| communism, would obliterate it. | |
| Yet the ideologies are simply mirror images. | |
| Yet the ideologies are simply mirror images. | |
| Wonderful, wonderful sophistry here. | |
| First of all, he's calling it an ideology. | |
| Ideology always has a negative perspective, a negative context, because ideology is not considered fact-based. | |
| So the laws of physics are not ideologies. | |
| The laws of mathematics or mathematical equations that are correctly solved are not ideologically solved. | |
| So the moment you say ideology, you're talking about irrational personal preference, emotional biases operating under the guise of some sort of universal principles. | |
| So it's wonderful. | |
| He calls it an ideology without proving that it's an ideology. | |
| So you get to call something an ideology if you never define it. | |
| And mirror images is great because, you know, if you ever stand in that mirror, you see yourself reflected infinitely in either direction. | |
| You go on forever. | |
| That's wonderful because it's a sort of empty narcissistic image which ties in really nicely with the selfishness that's being talked about. | |
| These guys are really good. | |
| Who is it? | |
| Nick Hanauer and Eric Luilu. | |
| So both attempt to answer the same questions and fail to do so in similar ways. | |
| It's wonderful. | |
| Attempt to answer the same question and fail to do so in similar ways. | |
| Well, let's see what the questions are, what the answers are, and how they logically fail. | |
| I really don't like it when somebody tells me that something is going to fail ahead of time because it's almost always the case. | |
| That they never actually prove it. | |
| They just tell you that it doesn't work. | |
| They don't actually tell you how. | |
| Where communism was adopted, communism was not adopted. | |
| This is a real problem. | |
| Communism was not adopted. | |
| It wasn't like the average peasant out in Cambodia really thought, hey, you know, if all the ideologies and all the philosophies and all the ideas and all the political systems that I've been exposed to and I've studied I think I find the case for communism the most convincing and the most rational. | |
| Neither was this true of the kulaks in Russia or the peasants in China who, during the time of starvation in the 1930s, ended up eating the goose feathers from their pillows in a desperate attempt to gain any kind of nutrition. | |
| And they tried to eat rope, anything to fill up their bellies. | |
| This was not something that was adopted. | |
| Communism was totalitarianistically inflicted by a radical group of psychopaths because, I mean, the system caused mass murder, slaughter, death, and starvation everywhere it was inflicted. | |
| It was inflicted on people. | |
| It was not adopted. | |
| Like, say, it's a lovely cat. | |
| The result was misery, poverty, and tyranny. | |
| If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophes. | |
| So look, it's great. | |
| We've been upgraded from radical to extremist. | |
| And extremist is one of these words that is meaningless. | |
| And it's a word that is used when you don't have an argument. | |
| Oh, your beliefs are ghastly. | |
| They're an extremist. | |
| Can you imagine a scientific review of Einstein saying that Einstein was an extremist adherent to the scientific method? | |
| He was a radical extremist when it came to the scientific method. | |
| Or if you, you know, you imagine you're sort of at grade school and your teacher says two and two make four. | |
| And you say, what, always and forever? | |
| Well, yeah, always and forever. | |
| Well, that's a radical extremist position. | |
| Radical and extremist is, it's like the word overreaction. | |
| By definition, it's an excessive reaction, but you don't actually have to prove it if you can apply the label ahead of time. | |
| Let's start with some definitions. | |
| Oh, fantastic! | |
| Definitions! | |
| Let's see if they're logical. | |
| Let's see if they're rational. | |
| I wonder. | |
| Let's start with some definitions. | |
| By radical libertarianism, we mean the ideology that holds that individual liberty trumps all other values. | |
| False. | |
| So false, it's embarrassing. | |
| The first thing you need to do when you want to criticize an ideology or a belief system or a philosophy or whatever you want to call it, is you need to study it. | |
| I spend entire courses in college studying socialism and communism and so on. | |
| Really understand them. | |
| I can argue that position. | |
| I can argue the religious position very well, as I've done in a variety of podcasts. | |
| You really need to understand the opponents that you have and give them the respect of at least having put some thought into what they're doing. | |
| So, the ideology that holds that individual liberty trumps all other values, that is not libertarianism. | |
| Libertarianism is founded on the non-aggression principle, which is, thou shalt not initiate the use of force against others. | |
| It is the non-aggression principle, and its corollary are the other side of the same coin, which is the respect for property rights. | |
| Now, I'm not going to go into the rational defense of those two principles here. | |
| I've done that elsewhere in many The idea that individual liberty trumps all other values. | |
| Now, trumps is a wonderful phrase because, first of all, through Donald Trump, it invokes capitalism. | |
| And secondly, it is what you do in a card game. | |
| A card game has no moral value. | |
| The ace trumps the three. | |
| It just trumps it. | |
| In other words, we just say that individual liberty is everything and all other values. | |
| What other values are there? | |
| Individual liberty trumps all other values. | |
| Again, there's no moral argument here. | |
| There's no rational argument here. | |
| All there is is an appeal to prejudice and emotion. | |
| It's delicious. | |
| So by communism, we mean the ideology of extreme state domination of private and economic life. | |
| Again, extreme state domination of private and economic life, how does that not occur under Nazism, which is not called a communist society, but rather a Nazi society. | |
| It's often considered to be distinct from Mussolini's fascist societies and so on. | |
| So extreme state domination of private and economic life, how does that not include, say, ancient Egypt? | |
| How does that not include, say, a slave owning slaves? | |
| How is he not dealing with having extreme domination of a private and economic life? | |
| No. | |
| Communism is, very specifically, worker control or socialistic control of the means of production. | |
| You are allowed your own personal goods, but you are not allowed to own, under communism, the means of production, factories and capital goods and so on. | |
| They're all socialized or owned by the government, which is supposed to represent the proletariat. | |
| And so on. | |
| And it's supposed to make everyone wealthy because without the profit motive, you don't have to suppress worker wages, right? | |
| So a worker gets paid 10 bucks, the capitalist makes 3 bucks under government control of the means of production. | |
| According to communism, the worker can make 13 bucks because the predatory capitalist is not taking his slice off the top, blah-de-blah-de-blah. | |
| They've got both wrong, but that's natural. | |
| Some of the radical libertarians, see, they're not satisfied with just using the word libertarian. | |
| They actually have to use the word radical, I would guess, almost every single time. | |
| Some of the radical libertarians are Ayn Rand fans. | |
| Ah, fans, don't you love it? | |
| Um... | |
| Fans is just one of these wonderful words that doesn't require you to do any rational analysis. | |
| So, again, if I said that I was a fan of Einstein, as opposed to Einstein's theories have been both rationally and empirically validated, I am a fan of Dawkins rather than Dawkins' arguments for evolution in The Greatest Story Ever Told seem to be pretty well So, | |
| some of the radical libertarians are Ayn Rand fans who divide their fellow citizens into makers in the mold of John Galt and takers in the mold of anyone not John Galt. | |
| Again, this is this duality, and This is not, it's not Ayn Rand fans or whatever who divide their fellow citizens. | |
| This is, it is a rational Division. | |
| Like if you say, well, this biologist just arbitrarily divides, based upon his own radical personal ideology, he just divides certain creatures into amphibians and birds. | |
| I mean, there's no difference between any – this is just some arbitrary definition that he, in his irrational, extremist, polar opposite ideology, just happens to prefer. | |
| Well, no. | |
| I mean, there are people who produce things and make their money off producing things, and there are people who receive the products of stolen goods, and they are the recipients of those stolen goods. | |
| So if you are an entrepreneur, you're going out there creating something, making jobs, and so on, you're doing it in a status environment. | |
| It's not pure. | |
| It is the system that we're in, but that's still radically different from somebody who says that they hurt their back when they didn't really and are on disability and take welfare and take all of this stuff which they didn't earn, which other people have to produce. | |
| There are producers in the biological world, there are producers and there are parasites. | |
| And, you know, there's nothing moral about that. | |
| But to say that this is just, well, biologists just arbitrarily divide creatures into producers and hunters and parasites or whatever, or fish and mammals or whatever. | |
| It's just, we don't, those are objective, rational divisions which we identify. | |
| They are not made up. | |
| And of course, in the mold of John Galt, and takers in the mold of anyone not John Galt, well, of course, this is people who've never read the book. | |
| I mean, 99.9% of the people who go off on Ayn Rand just have no idea of the philosophy. | |
| I can't remember the name of the principle, so I'm sure people will remind me, but in order to figure out whether someone's good at something technical, you kind of have to be as good as they are to figure that out. | |
| How do you know if somebody's a really good or bad brain surgeon? | |
| You don't. | |
| I mean, you simply don't. | |
| In order to judge whether somebody's a really good or bad brain surgeon, you actually have to be a really good brain surgeon. | |
| In order to judge whether somebody's really good at philosophy, you kind of have to be really good at philosophy. | |
| How can you judge who's a really good physicist or biologist? | |
| Well, you can't. | |
| I can't either. | |
| I can't either. | |
| But if you are a really good physicist or biologist, you would have a chance. | |
| And so the number of people who can critically, incredibly judge Ayn Rand's philosophy are enormously few because you have to be as smart as Ayn Rand and as good at philosophy as Ayn Rand was to be able to judge or otherwise you're just doing this emotional bullshit which tends to be going here. | |
| Ayn Rand is not... | |
| First of all, he says, fellow citizens into makers and takers. | |
| And what this argument would be is to say that in all of Ayn Rand's literature, the only maker was John Gott. | |
| It wasn't Howard Rook. | |
| It wasn't Hank Reardon. | |
| It wasn't Dagny Taggart. | |
| It wasn't all of the other people who were productive and producers in the world, and so on. | |
| So again, saying that there's only one ideal and everyone else is evil is... | |
| Not even remotely true, according to... | |
| And Ayn Rand had transitional characters, right? | |
| Like the wet nurse in Atlas Shrug. | |
| Transitional characters who went from dependency or parasitism to virtue and integrity. | |
| Some, such as the Koch brothers, the moment you hear the Koch brothers... | |
| What was it? | |
| Some YouTuber was ranting about... | |
| They were about to prove that I was the recipient of Koch money, of money from the Koch brothers. | |
| It's like, hey, call me. | |
| Some, such as the Koch brothers. | |
| I wouldn't take money from the Koch brothers. | |
| I mean, I'm sure that I don't know whether they're fine or not people, but I just want to keep focused on you, the listener. | |
| Some, such as the Koch brothers, are economic royalists who repackage trickle-down economics as libertarian populism. | |
| Economic royalists. | |
| See, royalists in America is a really bad thing. | |
| It is privilege. | |
| It is virtue. | |
| It is state-granted monopoly and so on. | |
| The exact opposite of the free market. | |
| Again, from what I know about the Koch brothers, they are actually... | |
| And I did business with Koch when I was in business as an entrepreneur, but obviously not those guys. | |
| But... | |
| Economic royalists are mercantilists and monopolists and so on, and the Koch brothers are advocates of the free market, which is the exact opposite of royalism and so on, who repackage trickle-down economics. | |
| Repackage is another wonderful phrase, or a wonderful word, because repackage means that people don't want it, but if you repackage it as something else, they might want it. | |
| So it's sort of like many, many, many years ago when I was a teenager, a friend of mine's mother's boyfriend, we all went to his cottage for the weekend, which was great fun. | |
| And he was a baker. | |
| And he said to me, he said, oh yeah, I can't remember what we were talking about. | |
| He's saying, yeah, if the bread is one day old, you say it's one day fresh. | |
| I said, well, what if the bread is two days old? | |
| He said, well, and you call it two day fresh. | |
| What if it's six days old? | |
| Well, you call it six days fresh, but you probably wouldn't sell it because it's moldy. | |
| And so repackage means, well, they won't buy this, but if I repackage it, they might buy it. | |
| And so basically it's saying what people don't want, but you're going to try and trick them into taking something that they don't want because you'll just put some repackaging on it and so on and so on. | |
| Some are followers of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose highest aspiration is to shut down government. | |
| Again, I don't think that there's a senator who's an outright anarchist who said that what we want to do is have no government whatsoever. | |
| And again, there's no quotes here, right? | |
| As he quoted, I want to shut down all of government, blah, blah, blah, again. | |
| This is just the argument from extrapolation and absurdity. | |
| Some resemble the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist who has made a career out of trying to drown, stifle, or strangle government. | |
| Now, drown, stifle, or strangle government. | |
| This is to anthropomorphize government. | |
| Government is a concept. | |
| Government does not exist any more than a forest exists, independent of its individual trees and bushes and so on. | |
| And so somebody who's trying to drown, stifle, or strangle is automatically you put them in a criminal class. | |
| You know, like you drown kittens, you stifle to scent, and you strangle. | |
| What human being strangles anything who is virtuous? | |
| Virtuous. | |
| I mean, they don't even kill cows that way. | |
| So, you anthropomorphize government by saying that it's a kind of thing, or a kind of person, or a kind of living entity, and then you say that people are trying to drown, stifle, or strangle it, and suddenly we feel that these people are very bad. | |
| Yes, liberty is a core American value, and an overweening state can be unhealthy. | |
| Oh, and sorry, um... | |
| Trying to drown, stifle, or strangle government. | |
| Well, I mean, the Nazis had a government. | |
| Wasn't that the whole purpose of the Second World War? | |
| But just, you know, again, you wouldn't want to bring that up if you're trying to make this sort of nonsense. | |
| Yes, liberty is a core American value, and an overweening state can be unhealthy. | |
| Now, I really, really dislike it when people start with, yes, blah-de-blah-de-blah, but, you know, yes, yes, we understand that, you know, Being healthy is a good thing, but, you know, too much health can be bad. | |
| You know, again, this is just, it's the argument from moderation, which is just nonsense. | |
| You know, well, it's true that no axe murdering in your neighborhood is a good thing, but too much no axe murdering? | |
| I mean, we need... | |
| It's a complete misunderstanding of Aristotle's mean, right? | |
| So Aristotle made this argument, which had to do with the aesthetics of morality, where he said, if you are too brave, So brave courage is a virtue. | |
| If you have an excess of courage, you're foolhardy, you take ridiculous risks and probably get yourself killed. | |
| If you have a deficiency of courage, then you're a coward. | |
| So somewhere in the middle is good. | |
| Like if you have no capacity for anger, then you are going to get pushed around in life and you can't ever push back and you're just going to end up as some sort of... | |
| Real or metaphorical slave to someone else. | |
| But if you have too much anger and you scream at everyone, then nobody's going to want to have anything to do with you. | |
| You're going to end up a life of isolation. | |
| If you have too little love, then you're hot-hearted. | |
| If you have too much love, then you're some sort of whore, so to speak. | |
| Somewhere in the middle is a good thing. | |
| If you don't have anything to eat, you starve. | |
| If you have too much to eat, you get fat, so something in the middle is good. | |
| That's fine. | |
| It's not particularly useful, but it's not a bad way of looking at things. | |
| It's not syllogistic. | |
| It's not rational, but You know, you can aim for the middle there. | |
| But he didn't mean that, well, no rape is bad. | |
| Too much rape is bad. | |
| So somewhere in the middle, well, we have a medium amount of rape. | |
| I mean, he would never in a million years have made that argument. | |
| And also this is thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. | |
| You know, that you make a proposal called communism, somebody else makes a proposal called capitalism, and in the middle you end up with social democracies, which is the good. | |
| Again, it has no... | |
| I mean, two and two make four. | |
| No, two and two make six. | |
| Okay. | |
| The middle ground is two and two make five, so that's got to be correct. | |
| Again, it works with sort of compromise, right? | |
| So if you're negotiating with someone about something, then if you're negotiating the price for something, you may end up somewhere in the middle. | |
| That's fine, but not in terms of the moral values, like a medium amount of rape, assault, theft, and murder is not what we're looking for in society. | |
| And there are plenty of self-described libertarians. | |
| Oh, self-described. | |
| Love it. | |
| Love it. | |
| So self-described, because people say, well, Steph's books, they're self-published. | |
| So? | |
| Does that have to do with anything? | |
| It's a way of saying, well, Steph has not gone through the traditional publication route, which is sort of like saying, I wonder why there aren't more conservative scripts in Hollywood. | |
| Why is left and liberal and all of that so prevalent in Hollywood? | |
| And why is talk radio more conservative and so on? | |
| Well, he's a soft... | |
| I mean, Rush Limbaugh is a self-described radio host. | |
| Marlon Brando was a self-described actor. | |
| Like... | |
| What does that have to do? | |
| Self-described or not, what does it matter? | |
| I mean, are the arguments good or bad? | |
| It's like, well, I'm not going to review Einstein's general theory of relativity. | |
| My God, the man was working in a patent office. | |
| He's a self-described physicist. | |
| Do you know Shakespeare never went to playwriting school? | |
| He's a self-described playwright. | |
| What does it matter? | |
| Where the label comes from, who applied it to who, whether you've got some official stamp of debt slavery from some institution that hates any kind of truth and reason. | |
| But self-described is a way of saying, unvalidated by any external agency, and it's a way of dismantling or destroying people's arguments without actually having to address their arguments. | |
| Anyway. | |
| And there are plenty of self-described libertarians who have adopted the label, mainly because they support same-sex marriage or decry government surveillance. | |
| Now, again, when you say support and decry, you're saying, well, I like this, and I don't like that. | |
| I support bread pudding for dessert because it's tasty. | |
| I don't like Brussels sprouts up the nose because they block my scuba equipment. | |
| I mean, it's just a way of, well, I support this, and I don't support that. | |
| I like this, and I don't like that, right? | |
| It's like saying, well, physicists support Einstein, but they decry phrenology, right? | |
| Well, no. | |
| Einstein is correct. | |
| Phrenology was incorrect. | |
| That's measuring people's personality with the bumps on their head. | |
| These social libertarians aren't the problem. | |
| It's the nihilist anti-state libertarians of the Koch, Cruz, Norquist, Paul, Ron, and Rand alike school. | |
| Who should worry us? | |
| Ooh, nihilist. | |
| Oh my goodness. | |
| We've gone from radical to extremist to self-described to nihilist. | |
| Nihilist anti-state libertarians. | |
| Um... | |
| It's those nihilist, anti-Nazi Jews who should worry us. | |
| It's those nihilistic, anti-racists who should worry us. | |
| Human nature. | |
| Oh, I love it. | |
| This is going to be great. | |
| Now we have an argument from human nature, which is always, always, always projection, which is ascribing to other people faults that you yourself have and are unconscious of. | |
| Like communism, this philosophy is defective in its misreading of human nature. | |
| Misunderstanding of how societies work in utter failure to adapt to changing circumstances. | |
| Right! | |
| Of course! | |
| Communism, which centralizes control, destroys price, and therefore creates the insurmountable Misesian calculation problem and destroys all possibility of the rational allocation of the scarce resources of society and remains frozen in time and never invents anything new or any particular. | |
| There's a great book out there called East Minus West Equals Zero, which basically talks about how everything that is invented in the West is taken over by dictatorial assholes. | |
| But... | |
| So, the free market has an utter failure. | |
| Oh my god, I'm sorry, I shouldn't. | |
| Oh my god. | |
| So, the free market has an utter failure to adapt to changing circumstances. | |
| So, communist dictatorships and the free market both have a complete inability to adapt to changing circumstances. | |
| So voluntary free market interactions where people can say no to you at any time has a complete failure to adapt to changing circumstances. | |
| How do you people say this without your fingertips turning into fire and your head's exploding? | |
| I mean, it's just amazing how people, you know, locked in some ideological bigotry can say the most absurd things. | |
| My penis has an utter failure to adapt to changing vaginas. | |
| What it does! | |
| Anyway, sorry. | |
| Radical libertarianism assumes, of course, means that there's no argument. | |
| It's just an axiom that is in a bigoted way put forward and taken for granted. | |
| Radical libertarianism assumes that humans are wired only to be selfish, when in fact cooperation is the height of human evolution. | |
| Right. | |
| So the free market, which fundamentally relies on cooperation, there's a small amount of competition, but the vast majority of the free market is cooperation. | |
| It's called coopetition by some people who write for the Harvard Business Review and love to coin new words. | |
| But if you are, like when I was in business, I was competing with other software companies and every now and then we'd go up against another software company, we'd win a bid or they'd win a bid, we rarely lost. | |
| But we were cooperating with many more businesses than we were competing with. | |
| We were cooperating with the people who rented us offices, who provided us heat and electricity and cooling in the summer, who washed the windows and cleaned the floors and gave us computers and set up the network. | |
| We were cooperating with our own employees. | |
| Far more cooperation than competition in the free market. | |
| So the idea that human beings are wired only to be selfish. | |
| Now, selfishness has not been defined here at all. | |
| Neither has libertarianism. | |
| Neither has the free market. | |
| Neither has communism successfully. | |
| But human beings are wired only to be selfish when, in fact, cooperation is the height of human evolution. | |
| Quite agree. | |
| Quite agree. | |
| Cooperation requires... | |
| Voluntarism. | |
| You understand that? | |
| Like, sex to be lovemaking requires voluntarism. | |
| Both people have to want to be there, and the goat obviously is optional, though I highly recommend it. | |
| But both people have to want to be there in order for it to be sex. | |
| If one person violently does not want to be there, then it's called rape. | |
| Cooperation only occurs in a situation of voluntarism. | |
| It never occurs when there's a gun pointed to someone's head. | |
| Once you point a gun at someone's head, then So, in holding up the non-aggression principle, libertarians are creating the only possibility for cooperation that exists. | |
| So, saying that somehow... | |
| That libertarianism is against cooperation. | |
| When libertarianism says we should use voluntarism and negotiation and trade and peace and charity to resolve human disputes, we should never initiate the use of force and say, well, that's against cooperation. | |
| Because now what he's going to do, I bet he's going to make the case that the government is cooperation because the government is the only social agency that can legitimately and in fact is obligated to initiate the use of force and therefore I'm sure he's going to say that somehow democracy is cooperation. | |
| Remember, I think that Syria is about to get a couple of bomb loads of cooperation from us as well. | |
| It assumes that societies are efficient mechanisms requiring no rules or enforcers when in fact they are fragile ecosystems prone to collapse and easily overwhelmed by free riders. | |
| It assumes that societies are efficient mechanisms requiring no rules or enforcers. | |
| Well, no, of course, the moral rule is the non-initiation of force and the respect for property rights, and libertarians want the government to really focus on the three core issues. | |
| This is the minarchist position, the police, the military, and the law courts. | |
| And so the idea that libertarians do not believe that there are rules or no rules are needed It's simply false. | |
| Anarchists believe that no rulers can be moral or are needed. | |
| But not no rules. | |
| You're off by one pretty important letter there, my friend. | |
| Anarchism is not no rules. | |
| Anarchism is no rulers. | |
| Because anarchism is the understanding that when you have rulers, there are no rules. | |
| When you have rulers, there are no rules. | |
| Because it becomes about the violent whims of the rulers. | |
| And the rules are impossible when you have a violent ruler, any more than a fair fight when one of the boxers has decided to throw the fight. | |
| A fair fight is impossible. | |
| All right. | |
| Fragile ecosystems prone to collapse. | |
| Oh, yes, that's right. | |
| The free market is prone to collapse, unlike, say, virtually every government throughout history and about 350 fiat government currency systems never prone to collapse, and easily overwhelmed by free riders. | |
| Well, of course, if you're into the government, the government doesn't solve the free rider problem. | |
| Free rider problem is, well, if someone else is paying for it, I don't need to, or it's also called the problem of the commons. | |
| Which is the fact that if you have everybody with sheep around a common area, they all have an incentive to have people graze on the common area, and therefore you need a government. | |
| But how does the government be saying, well, things that are collective and unowned are a big problem, so let's have a government which is collective and unowned to solve that problem. | |
| All you do is you create a far greater problem of the commons by creating a government to solve the problem of the commons. | |
| It's an ex post facto justification for what has been violently imposed. | |
| Through the inertia of history, it has nothing to do with a rational solution from first principles to any problem. | |
| And it is fanatically, oh no, now we're fanatics! | |
| It's fanatically rigid, oh rigid, rigid is bad! | |
| And it is fanatically rigid in its insistence on a single solution to every problem. | |
| Roll back to the state! | |
| So, fanatically rigid. | |
| Insistence is not an argument. | |
| And libertarianism is not about rollback to state. | |
| Libertarians are as fanatically against rape and assault and theft and murder as they are against the state. | |
| It's just that the state is the biggest single enactor of rape, theft, assault and murder. | |
| I mean, what is it? | |
| 250 million people in the 20th century murdered by their own governments? | |
| That doesn't even count war. | |
| Put war in there, you're probably close to or over half a billion human beings murdered by the state. | |
| The number of people in America's incarceration system now exceeds the number of people in the Gulag Apigalago described by Solzhenitsyn under Stalin. | |
| 200,000-plus people raped men, almost exclusively, are raped every year We're good to go. | |
| So that's kind of important. | |
| I mean, when you do triage, you look at the worst problem and you try and deal with that. | |
| And if you're against rape, assault, theft, and murder, you have to focus on the state or you're missing the single greatest in actor of these immoralities. | |
| Communism failed in three strikingly similar ways, they say. | |
| I go a little faster now. | |
| It believed that humans should be willing cogs serving the proletariat. | |
| It assumed that societies could be run top-down like machines, and it too was fanatically rigid in its insistence on an all-encompassing ideology leading to totalitarianism. | |
| Right, so the initiation of the use of force, a rigid adherence to the initiation of the use of force, which is foundational to statism and totalitarianism of every flavor, the initiation of the use of force. | |
| Like the drug war is the initiation of the use of force. | |
| Laws against gambling are the initiation of the use of force. | |
| Taxation is the initiation of the use of force. | |
| So a totalitarian ideology which relies on the initiation of the use of force is exactly the same as a philosophy which advocates the non-initiation of the use of force. | |
| So X and the opposite of X are exactly the same. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| Just delightful. | |
| Radical libertarianism, if ever put into practice at the scale of something bigger than a tiny enclave, would also result in disaster. | |
| Now, first thing I would say is if an ideology has ever been put into place, I'd first look for where it had been put into place. | |
| So Ireland ran as a stateless society for about a thousand years. | |
| Iceland did it for a couple of hundred years at least. | |
| Somalia is doing better than almost all of its African neighbors in terms of technology penetration and life expectancy and infant mortality is lower. | |
| So since they got rid of their government, they're doing a lot better now. | |
| They're getting another government courtesy of the UN. Yay! | |
| And I'll just go back to being another African tragedy of shitholeness. | |
| So radical libertarianism, I think that's also called the Founding Fathers, I think. | |
| So you'd look at, say, the elements of the founding of America where libertarianism, libertarian principles were put into practice. | |
| They weren't put into practice in slavery. | |
| Slavery was a holdover from monarchy, from tribalism. | |
| I mean, so slaves were bought and sold by every race throughout all of human history, and Africa was a wonderful place to go and pick up some slaves from the other blacks and so on. | |
| And I mean, the whites didn't want to go in to the jungle because they'd get killed by bugs and tigers, but they would love to scoop up all of the slaves captured by the other blacks to be sold to the whites. | |
| The whites were just one of the chain of custody of slaves. | |
| And so slavery had nothing to do with libertarianism. | |
| And so You would look at the market of, say, the 19th century in America and you would find that wages continually went up. | |
| And the cost of living went down. | |
| And so saying that would also be a disaster, you can say it rather than actually looking at any history. | |
| We would say the conditional would. | |
| We say the conditional would, because radical libertarianism has a fatal flaw, flaw, flaw. | |
| It can't be applied across a functioning society. | |
| What might radical libertarians do if they actually had power? | |
| A President Paul would rule by tantrum. | |
| Oh my god. | |
| Shutting down the government in order to repeal laws already passed by Congress. | |
| A secretary of Norquist would eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and progressive taxation so that the already wealthy could exponentially compound their advantage as the programs that sustain a prosperous middle class are gutted. | |
| Well, what's happened in America is that the gap between the rich and the poor has widened catastrophically. | |
| It started as a crack in the sidewalk, now it's like the Grand Canyon. | |
| Of course, the government policies were designed to shrink this gap and violence almost achieves the opposite of what its claim is. | |
| It claims our welfare is going to help the poor. | |
| Oh, look, they're trapped in poverty. | |
| Oh, don't worry, we've got foreign policy to bring peace to the world. | |
| Well, since the early 1960s, America has bombed or invaded a country approximately every three years. | |
| And, oh, look, we're going to go and save the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, and now their genetic integrity has been permanently compromised by the near-permanent depleted uranium that is in their soil, the air, and the water. | |
| And about a million of them have died, and one and a half million have fled. | |
| So, the idea that... | |
| You can use violence to solve complex social problems as the opposite. | |
| Oh, this woman won't have sex with me. | |
| Well, she would have sex with me if she loved me. | |
| So if I rape her, she'll love me because we'll have had sex, right? | |
| This is how the logic would cause you rape or she'll hate you. | |
| But this is the logic of violence and the logic of statism. | |
| It's not logical. | |
| But it serves those in power, so it's presented as logical. | |
| Yeah, he would eliminate the Internal Revenue Service. | |
| Well, there's something. | |
| The fact that you could say he would eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and just automatically assume That everyone would be against that means that you move in a very teeny tiny little circle of liberalism. | |
| I mean, it just means that you're in an echo chamber, which is why he's got all these images of mirrors reflecting each other and bias and bigotry, because these guys live... | |
| The fact that you just present that, like, well, they would eliminate the internal revenue service and progressive taxation, and that's, like, immediately... | |
| Like, you don't have to make any arguments as to why that would be bad. | |
| It just means that you're around people... | |
| Who tell you back what you already know, what you already think. | |
| You're just a racist in the KKK saying, well, everyone I know is racist. | |
| Or like Pauline Kyle, the movie critic for the New York Times, said in the 1970s. | |
| She said, I have no idea how Nixon got elected. | |
| I didn't know anyone who voted for him. | |
| Or you can read Ben Shapiro's books on Hollywood and TV and just how ridiculously liberal it all is. | |
| I mean, the vast majority of TV programming is produced by about 300 people who all know each other, who all come from the same background, and who all have the same political beliefs. | |
| Ben Shapiro tried to – he's a conservative, and he tried to get some scripts that he was requested to write for a couple of shows in, and they Googled him, and they found his website, and they said, well, we're not going to work with you. | |
| You're a conservative. | |
| Because remember how bad McCarthyism was? | |
| Anyway, that's projection again. | |
| A Koch domestic policy would eliminate, would obliterate environmental standards for clean air and water so that polluters could externalize all their costs unto other people. | |
| Well, you know, this again, this is just you read a government pamphlet and you assume it's the truth. | |
| I mean, pollution, air and water, and soil pollution, they're all being solved by the time the EPA was put into place in the 70s. | |
| What happens is problems start getting solved, and then governments jump on the bandwagon and say, we solved them. | |
| And then people can't remember, like that old guy in 1984, that Winston Smith talks through the bar, couldn't remember what life was like before the revolution. | |
| Well, we're sort of there now, particularly. | |
| These guys are younger, for sure. | |
| Radical libertarians would be great at destroying. | |
| They would have little concept of creating or governing. | |
| It's in failed states such as Somalia that libertarianism find its fullest actual expression. | |
| Well, it's interesting. | |
| I mean, so the Somalia thing is about as boring to libertarians as the Hitler and Stalin thing is for atheists. | |
| Well, hey, Hitler and Stalin were atheists, and atheism created all these problems and so on. | |
| It's like, come on. | |
| I don't believe in leprechauns. | |
| From not believing in leprechauns, can you extrapolate my political position, my moral position, my philosophical position, my social position? | |
| No. | |
| I don't believe in unicorns. | |
| What does that say about me in terms of politics? | |
| Nothing. | |
| Anyway, that means I'm not going to vote for a unicorn. | |
| That's it. | |
| That's all I'm willing to concede. | |
| Now, interesting, so in Somalia, if you think that it's an expression of libertarianism, all you have to do is look up Somali philosophers, Somali thinkers, read the Somali media that's been translated, and ask yourself whether they are focused on libertarian ideals. | |
| And you will find that they're not. | |
| You know, if a whole bunch of churches collapse, that doesn't make everyone a philosophical atheist. | |
| And the fact that a state collapses doesn't make everybody a philosophical voluntarist, or libertarian, or anarchist, or anything. | |
| Extreme positions. | |
| Some libertarians will claim we are arguing against a straw man and that no serious adherent to their philosophy advocates the extreme positions we describe. | |
| Claim, straw man, advocation, at least he called it philosophy, extreme positions. | |
| Again, these are all just adjectives that have nothing to do with any rational argument or empirical evidence. | |
| The public record of extreme statements by the likes of Cruz, Norquist, and Paul speaks for itself. | |
| Great! | |
| They've got a public record of extreme statements. | |
| Let's see where they are. | |
| Oh. | |
| They don't quote them. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, I guess it's a lot easier to call somebody an extremist rather than quote anything extreme that they've said. | |
| Reasonable people debate how best to regulate or how government can most effectively do its work, not whether to regulate at all or whether government should even exist. | |
| So, reasonable people debate. | |
| Hmm. | |
| Reasonable people debate. | |
| So, what does a government law do? | |
| Does a government law send someone over to your house to debate with you about the best way to deal with the complexities of poverty? | |
| No, I think they basically just take your money at gunpoint and do that. | |
| So, reasonable people debate I think is a fine principle, but I really don't understand how the government And its violence-enforced laws could possibly be put under the category of debating with you. | |
| The government says jump and they say how high and you either jump that high or you go to jail. | |
| It's jump or be shot. | |
| I don't really see how there's a lot of debate involved in that. | |
| Reasonable people debate whether we should rape 50 or 100 women in this village. | |
| See, reasonable people debate Well, can we not let the women have a say in this? | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | |
| There's a reasonable people debate about whether we should rape 50 or 100 women. | |
| I mean, to just say we shouldn't rape any is to eliminate debate! | |
| Oh my God, how do these people, I don't know. | |
| How do they tie their shoes? | |
| It's a mystery. | |
| The alternative to this extremism is an evolving blend of freedom and cooperation. | |
| Ooh, an evolving blend. | |
| Look, now we're a cooking show! | |
| The relationship between social happiness and economic success can be plotted on a bell curve. | |
| And the sweet spot is away from the extremes of either pure liberty or pure communitarianism. | |
| Why are we introducing communitarianism here? | |
| That is where true citizenship and healthy capitalism are found. | |
| Again, has he made any rational argument, any principled argument? | |
| No, he's just saying, there's a sweet spot, and it's right next to the G-spot of government. | |
| True citizenship enables a society to thrive for precisely the reasons that communism and radical libertarianism... | |
| He's got to say, radical? | |
| I cannot. | |
| It is based on a realistic conception of human nature that recognizes we must cooperate to be able to compete at higher levels. | |
| Again, saying that the government is about cooperation... | |
| I mean, yeah, okay, they'll let you vote, but they only get to let you vote for who gets to order you around, and the only people who are chosen to be put in front of you for who you get to vote for are people who've been bought and sold already by special interest groups. | |
| Why do you think Barack Obama hasn't prosecuted anyone on Wall Street, for God's sakes? | |
| Because he got the single largest source of his funding came from Wall Street. | |
| Why is it that the senators and congressmen Who are voting yes to attack Syria get 83% more funding from the military-industrial complex. | |
| Bought and paid for. | |
| You don't get to choose. | |
| Anyway. | |
| But yeah, we must be able to cooperate. | |
| I agree. | |
| Cooperation is really important, which is why we've got to not have a gun in the room when we're trying to make decisions. | |
| That's really not cooperation. | |
| True citizenship means changing policy to adapt to changes and circumstances. | |
| Sometimes government isn't the answer. | |
| Other times it is. | |
| Sometimes it's not. | |
| We don't know when. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Let's just see which way the pendulum goes. | |
| Sometimes we should use physics, and sometimes we should attempt to build things by looking at the chicken entrails exploded with a cherry bomb. | |
| I don't know which one was supposed to be, but call me a thinker, will ya? | |
| If the US is to continue to adapt and evolve... | |
| Adaptation and evolution. | |
| Anyway. | |
| We have to see that freedom isn't simply the removal of encumbrance. | |
| Encumbrance? | |
| What, are you taking my backpack off, for Christ's sake? | |
| Oh, man, that's a heavy hat. | |
| Thank you for disencumbering me. | |
| No, it's the removal of the initiation of force. | |
| But you can't say that. | |
| You have to call it encumbrance. | |
| Or the ability to ignore inconvenient rules or limitations. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| See, when you go to jail for 20 years for selling people a piece of vegetable that other people don't like, that's kind of an inconvenience. | |
| Repetitive rape and solitary confinement and food with roaches on it and no sleep... | |
| For 20 years. | |
| That's kind of inconvenient. | |
| Don't you think? | |
| Or limitations. | |
| Freedom is responsibility. | |
| Communism failed because it kept citizens from taking responsibility for governing themselves. | |
| By preaching individualism above all else, so does radical libertarianism. | |
| What is the all else that is being talked about? | |
| By preaching rape above all... | |
| By preaching anti-rape above all else... | |
| By preaching, don't steal above all else. | |
| By preaching, don't murder above all else. | |
| Else what? | |
| It is one thing to oppose intrusive government surveillance or the overreach of federal programs. | |
| Overreach! | |
| You don't have to say what is reach and what is underreach. | |
| You just have to use the word over, and it's bad. | |
| And you use intrusive government surveillance, like you use radical libertarianism. | |
| It's intrusive, and it's bad. | |
| It's an overreach. | |
| Reach is good to remind me of that great line from the great philosophical movie, Clueless. | |
| One girl turns to the letter and says, I know you can be, like, overwhelmed, and I also know you can be, like, underwhelmed, but can you ever be just, like, whelmed? | |
| And he almost says, uh, I think in Europe you can be. | |
| Over, under, overreached, intrusive, it's all the nonsense. | |
| It's time to call for the evisceration of government itself. | |
| Sorry, call for the evisceration of government itself. | |
| Again, evisceration, you know, you've got to get its harry-carry there. | |
| Bureaucratic intestines spilling all over the floor. | |
| Evisceration is, you know, it's another to call for the evisceration of murder itself. | |
| What does that even mean? | |
| It's really bad to call for the evisceration of child abuse. | |
| Well, child abuse is bad. | |
| Shouldn't we end it? | |
| Let's put radical libertarianism into the dustbin of history along with its cousin, communism. | |
| Anyway, I mean, they're not... | |
| Oh, so these guys, it doesn't really matter who they are, but they're certainly not philosophers. | |
| They're good sophists, and I guess if you already have a bias towards this kind of stuff, then it kind of makes sense. | |
| And I'm sorry that this was so long. | |
| It's enjoyable for me. | |
| I hope it was enjoyable for you, too. | |
| If you find this stuff useful, please let me know. | |
| Please help push my Syria video. | |
| I'm trying not to hang myself from the rafters. | |
| The fact that my Miley Cyrus ramble is doing far better than the attempt to stop war through facts about Syria. | |
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| Really appreciate it. | |
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